Obscure Litostomatean to ease protist cravings - Troglodytella

I heard you guys miss protists. Lemme put one up to help cope with the prolongued absense. Hmmm, something quick...ah, can't go wrong with obscure Litostomatea!

Intestinal ciliate Troglodytella abrassarti from siamangs, a type of gibbon, apparently. Scalebars: 20um (O'Donoghue et al. 1993 Int J Parasitol)

Eight contractile vacuoles? Wow. This thing is huge and complicated. They're awesome! I mean, take look at its close relative Troglocorys -- Litostomatean morphology is perfect for inspiring huge creepy alien life in some sci-fi novel! (O'Donoghue et al. 1993 Int J Parasitol)

Slowly working my way through the ciliome*...might take a while. Hope your protist cravings have been very slightly eased for now... should finally have a Sunday Protist up towards the end of this weekend though! Back to finishing my slides for tomorrow's undergrad conference...

*An aside about -omics: Apparently 'genome' originated as a portmanteau of 'gene' and 'chromosome'... and 'chromosome' is not based on the Greek-derived suffix -ome, instead ending in -soma (body). Further wiki-ing reveals that -oma is not a real suffix in Greek, but instead a reanalysis of ...o-ma, misinterpreting the morpheme boundary as being before the o, not after. Thus, -ome was not even a real suffix, and only recently began to imply a 'totality'. Aside from being a bit of an abomination run wild, -ome is also a real cool example of new [bound!] morpheme formation based on reanalysis and erroneous analogy. In case anyone wonders where words can come from...

Reference
ODONOGHUE, P., GASSER, R., & TRIBE, A. (1993). New host record for the entodiniomorphid ciliate, troglodytella abrassarti, from siamangs (hylobates syndactylus) International Journal for Parasitology, 23 (3), 415-418 DOI: 10.1016/0020-7519(93)90020-Y